Schmertronix – dedicated to live with electronics performances.

06 – bpmf

Jason Szostek aka bpmf first performed live in the spring of 1986 with his pretechno electronica duo known as The Free World. Then, they had dragged out almost their entire studio for the opening of an art gallery; fortunately the equipment kept getting progressively smaller and his groups of collaborators progressively bigger so that by the end of the 90s he had played over 100 shows all over the world. With John Selway as Synapse, Dietrich Schoenemann and Taylor Deupree as Prototype 909, all of them and Abe Duque, Sussane Brokesch and Zach Veitze as the Rancho Relaxo All-Stars. Ambience, experimental electronica, techno, acid, electro… basically anything you could do with an SH 101 or an electrified Er Hu, bpmf would give it a go.

Despite all of this experience improvising and playing live in all these various collaborations for three decades he had only played solo as bpmf a total of three times. That would change in 2015 when he teamed up with Rizumu in Philadelphia and began performing regularly in his home city, occasionally venturing off on mini tours of the US and Germany. In the half decade since, bpmf has done 60+ shows, recording many of them and releasing some of them. He has evolved a style of “prepared improvisation” whereby a myriad of scenes, sounds, sequences and structures that could become “tracks” are worked out in practice only to be assembled spontaneously for the audience.
This system has ensured that even back to back performances are radically different from each other often with some surprises.

For Schmertronix we have a performance from June of 2019, peek in person live bpmf techno giving us a prime example of how, as the members of Tackhead Soundsystem used to say, Jason is one “button pushin motha fucka”.

Since the lockdown there have been a series of online events, ambient and electro with more coming soon including at techno-club for UK based Hydrid and his return to Liquid Sky Cologne after 25 years.
After decades of releases on various labels, 2021 sees the release of bpmf‘s first full length techno/electro release on Pingdiscs:


bpmf - The Anarchist's Cookbook